Cannabis Alcohol Extraction at Home: Process & Equipment

You Can Do It!

Crafting your own extractions at home is unimaginably fun, exciting, and rewarding but for the beginner it can be a daunting task. Understanding how to perform an extraction and what’s safe to do at home can be hard, but after reading this I hope you feel much more informed and brave enough to try it yourself.

Why Choose Alcohol Extraction For The Home?

There are various methods and processes used to extract oils from botanical material. To determine the best process for a cannabis extraction enthusiast to use at home we should first consider what the options are. There’s a long list of solvents that can be used for extraction including butane, propane, C02, naphtha, acetone, isopropyl, ethanol, and many more. The arguments for and against the use of each of these solvents fill volumes of threads, blogs, and how-to-videos. After taking into account all aspects of the various extraction methods I’ve determined, in my opinion, food-grade ethanol is best for at home extraction. The process is the same using ethanol and isopropyl, but I recommend food grade ethanol above all other options. I’m a fan of alcohol extraction because with the proper equipment anyone can easily craft a beautiful creation in a couple short hours. In this post I explain the alcohol extraction process in simple terms, what I like about alcohol extraction for the home user, alcohol evaporation techniques, and what equipment is available for the home crafter. The discussion will be kept very basic so if there is something more advanced that you would like to know or discuss definitely hit me up at ichibancrafter@gmail.com and ask me anything you’d like.

The use of alcohol extraction has been around for thousands of years and in practice it’s quite simple. Alcohol acts as a solvent, striping the THC, CBD, terpenes, chlorophyll, fats, lipids and wax compounds from plant material then suspending those compounds in alcohol solution form. The first step in the extraction process is the “wash” where the cannabis plant material is soaked in alcohol to collect the desired components. Second, the wash is separated from the plant material using a strainer and the alcohol solution is further filtered until it’s particulate free. Lastly, the alcohol is evaporated out of the solution until what remains is a highly concentrated form of the botanical components harvested from the cannabis plant. Three basic steps, wash, filter, and evaporate that’s it.

For the home crafter making botanical oils or cannabis concentrates I like alcohol extraction because, in addition to it being the most healthful choice, it’s very obtainable, affordable, and easy to replicate with a high level of certainty and confidence. BHO makes a beautiful product but the process is immensely dangerous, not to mention the toxic nature of the butane and residual poisons. In a commercial production facility it may be possible to rid the final concentrate of toxic contaminates but its highly unlikely for the do-it-in-the-garage setting. CO2 also makes a stunning concentrate, but the required equipment is difficult to use and not affordable for home, small batch use. There are other traditional methods for making concentrates and medicine like make bubble hash, but it’s time consuming, labor intensive, and ends up with lower potency in comparison to its peers. Oils, butter, and vegetable glycerin are also used as a medium for ‘infusion’, as apposed to ‘extraction’, and are good for making medicated edibles when green chlorophyll, fats, wax residue, low efficiency, and low potency are acceptable. Rosin press extraction is an unarguably pure product but the process suffers from efficiency, yield, and application limitations. Enter your every day alcohol extraction to save the day.

Using food grade alcohol means your end product will be absolutely NON-TOXIC. You will hear terms like ‘solvent-less’ and ‘solvent-free’ concentrates being touted as the only concentrate acceptable to be considered “medicine” and healthy enough to smoke. A simple line dividing “solvent” and “solvent-free” is misleading and it inappropriately demonizes alcohol extracts. Residual alcohol in a purged concentrate will be negligible. Any negligible amount of food-grade, non-toxic alcohol is not any more dangerous than the plant material being smoked. Please don’t be influenced by the “solvent-less” propaganda because it’s not applicable to food-grade ethanol extraction.

What Can You Do With Alcohol Extraction?

Alcohol is a great tool and a very efficient solvent that can be used in different ways to achieve different results. When preparing to perform an extraction it is important to first determine what form the final product take and what it’ll be used for. For medicinal extractions like FECO a long soak of 1-hour to several days is used resulting in a dark green or black oil for oral ingestion. On the other end of the spectrum, to make a great smokable concentrate that’s clean in color and flavor use a process called QWET (Quick Wash Ethanol) that requires freezing of the material and a wash of only several minutes. Then, somewhere in-between the long medicinal soak and the QWET is a happy medium used to make delicious edibles without the unsavory green plant flavor. Alcohol extraction provides a lot of flexibility and control over your final product. A huge benefit of using alcohol extraction is the ability to use already extracted cannabis material to perform a second wash and extraction adding huge value to your process. I don’t know another extraction technique that has so many different applications.

Another reason to like alcohol extraction is the high efficiency of collecting Terpenes along with THC and CBD. Alcohol holds Terpenes well but if they are subsequently subjected to higher than necessary heat they will evaporate or be destroyed at an increasing rate with higher temperatures. Maintaining low temperatures throughout the extraction process is the only way to protect the valuable terpenes and have a final product with the maximum amount of flavor and healing power.

What’s The Process and Equipment Necessary for Alcohol Extraction?

To convert the alcohol solution from a liquid to a concentrate the alcohol must be removed through evaporation. There’re different evaporative techniques that vary from downright simple, seriously dangerous, and pure genius. The original old school and most simple technique is natural evaporation achieved by pouring the alcohol solution into a flat bottom pyrex dish in a thin layer and allowing to evaporte into the air for 1-2 days with a small fan blowing gently over the area. When the solution is completely dried the final product is scrapped off and collected.The most dangerous and Darwin Award worthy way to evaporate the alcohol is in a pot, on the stove-top, over an open flame. Disaster is just waiting for the highly combustable evaporated alcohol vapor filling the kitchen. Using a rice cooker to evaporate the alcohol is almost as dangerous when done in an enclosed area . It isn’t as bad as boiling alcohol over an open flame, but it must to be performed outdoors for safety. Unfortunately, with any open evaporation technique like these, the neighbors for miles will smell exactly what you’re doing.

If you want more method to your cannabis cooking madness there’s a lot of equipment on the market to help you. Sadly, most of the stuff for sale is laborious or ineffective, or both. There are a number of rigs you can cobble together yourself or purchase that are either ‘open’ or ‘closed-loop’. An open alcohol extraction setup allows the evaporating vapor to escape into the air. Conversely, a closed-loop captures the evaporating vapor, condenses it and reclaims the alcohol for reuse. A fully self-contained closed loop system not only removes the danger of accidental fires but also eliminates the pungent odor of cannabis extraction. Closed loop systems are the best choice by far, but the inexpensive contraptions people cobble together themselves involve various cumbersome interconnected sections, an external vacuum pumps that are very noisy, difficult to control performance settings and unreliable components . These systems work but are not worth the effort or cost when you consider the options.

This brings me to the three products that make the most sense for the at home cannabis crafting enthusiast. The Magical Butter Machine (MBM) was a game changer when it first came out. In reality it’s simply borrowed existing technology of Chinese made soy milk (almond milk) makers and rebranded it as a cannabis tool. It only performs infusions, not extractions. MBM doesn’t work well with alcohol but I included it here because it’s a great entry point for experimenting and getting your feet wet with working with cannabis without a large investment. It’s primarily used to infuse oils and butters with cannabis by emulsifying and mixing the contents in a heated container. Quite frankly, the function the MBM performs is the same as simmering butter and cannabis on the stove top. It claims the ability to make a weak tincture by alcohol “extraction” but in reality it simply steeps the cannabis and this is not useful. The MBM is unable to make concentrates like quality clean butter or oils, tinctures, smokable oil, wax and shatter. Being an open system it allows the vapors to escape into the air creating a reasonable amount of pungent odor. The nature of the open system also means it operates at higher temperatures that’ll not only cause some uncontrolled decarbing it will destroy a good portion of the powerful and tasty terpenes. In short, if you’re simply looking for something that infuses butter and oil, with the plant matter emulsified in, and don’t want to use a slow cooker or a pot on the stove to do the same thing, this will work. My main problem with this process is the resulting green chlorophyll sludge flavor in my final product and this is a deal breaker for any quality output. The main advantage is that it’s super easy or beginners to use.

Next easiest and affordable tools are alcohol distillers. An alcohol distiller can be used to make low quality cannabis oil by heating the alcohol solution to evaporation and reclaiming a good portion of the alcohol in an external collection vessel. These are not designed to make extractions, but many people use them because of their speed and volume of production. Because they are designed for alcohol distillation, and not cannabis oil production, there’s no design consideration into how to remove the oil from the unit when its finished. Removing the oil from a distiller can be messy, troublesome, and wasteful. The distillers work at normal atmospheric pressure and without the assistance of vacuum. This means they work at higher temperatures and compromise the quality of the final product making it impossible to produce anything high quality or smokable. Additionally, there’s no way to see inside and observe the operation’s progress. Continuous monitoring of the final product is important to achieve the exact desired concentrate consistency and avoid burning the oil. The main advantage of using a distiller is they are cheap, easy, and fast. The main disadvantage is they are limited to only making low quality FECO.

Finally, the unit I think is pure genius, the Source Turbo by ExtractCraft (www.extractcraft.com). It’s a completely self-contained, closed-loop, heated vacuum chamber, designed to give the user ultimate control to make exactly what they want in a safe environment. Depending on the preparation of what’s put into the Source, and the post-process attention applied, a user can make the strongest tincture, cleanest and most potent canna butter, pure oil, wax, terp rich snap and pull, and with some patience even shatter. Neither the Magical Butter Machine nor distillers can make this claim.

The self-contained, closed-loop design keeps the alcohol solution, final product, and reclaimed alcohol together in one unit saving time, space and clean up hassle as well as restricting all evaporative, flammable pungent fumes from escaping into the surrounding area. Neither the Magical Butter Machine nor distillers do this.

In addition to the ability to craft a wide array of final products, safety, and zero smelly fumes, the Source Turbo’s closed-loop system combined with it’s vacuum capability provides one more huge advantage, low temperature processing. It allows the extraction process to operate at an average of around 100F. The aggressive terpene collecting abilities of ethanol coupled with the ability to purge at only 100F creates some incredibly terpene potent final products that amaze me every time I finish a batch. The concentrates hit so much harder when packed with terpenes. This is the only extraction tool that can make a high quality smokable in one batch, then the highest quality medicinals in the next. Nothing else is even close.

By definition a closed-loop system means a percentage of the alcohol that is used in the process will be reclaimed for reuse. This machine is so efficient that I have measured 95%-97% recovery every time. The engineering is astonishing in this little, unassuming, plain looking machine. They actually figured out a way to apply a “Turbo” mode, that works twice as fast as normal mode, yet still operates around 100F! Then, consider their achievement of the world’s first appliance that can be tuned for the altitude of your specific location to achieve maximum performance. Lastly, the entire chamber is glass! You can clearly monitor the process and stop it at the exact moment it reaches the desired consistency. I get to control it all, see it all, not smell it and stay completely safe in my own kitchen, I’m blown away by this machine………..pure genius.

Do you have any information on using bunk to make oil. We found ourselves with undesirable product from a source we no longer use. While we don’t want to smoke it, we are hoping we can use it to make oil so that our money is not lost. Our concern is that there are pesticides and/or other toxic contaminants on the cannabis. Do you know if making oil using ethyl alcohol will concentrate any toxic material or if it might possibly leave them behind?

Sarah,
You can defiantly use low quality material to make a good concentrate. That is the beauty of extraction. Unfortunately, toxic contaminants in the alcohol extraction will be a simple operation of what you put in you will get out. If there are pesticides and other undesirable contaminates I wouldn’t mess with it…..

Using dry ice in small cooler to freeze the material and ethanol (been using eXractohol.com 190, organic), makes a huge difference in waxes and chlorophyll pick up. Beautiful amber color. Also using a distiller from Nuitriteam.com to recover the ethanol (way to expensive to just evaporate). I think the yields are improved also, as you can do long soaks (10 min) and multiple runs as long as everything is keep in the cooler between runs. Video on Utube. Under “alcohol extractions, poster is Kleenex Xtract.

Hey Randy!
I did numerous runs of different sizes from a 1/4 to 3oz. All of it with the the same trim and found a few things (none of it terribly scientific unfortunately). The speed that you can cool the Everclear and plant material is convenient. With chopped up trim it definitely reduces the green leak and gives you more margin of error over just using the freezer to cool. Combining the super-cooling of the dry ice and a Buchner funnel really helps deliver a clean wash. I didn’t notice much difference in yield between 3 minutes and 10 minute washes. I am not sure if the lack of yield increase with time exposed is a result of saturation levels or a result in the low quality material I was using. I am going to continue to experiment. I just posted a shatter how-to yesterday that included the dry ice suggestion. I wanted to give you a credit there but I only have your real name as on your email and thought you probably wouldn’t want that up there. Have you had any good developments?

It’s interesting where some Google searches will lead you. As someone who doesn’t live in Colorado or a similar state, I don’t currently indulge in, um… “herbal remedies” – perhaps something for the future. However I’m in the process of learning the somewhat less illegal (only slightly if unlicensed like myself) process of alcohol distilling. Some distillers actually make much of their money on selling flavor extracts (in fact if you’re a distiller in North Carolina – good luck making money if you aren’t also in the extract business). So a search for “alcohol recovery” led me here.

As far as the “Green Oil Machine” – When sold for alcohol purposes including the heater control, it’s more like $175 or so. Looks identical to the Co-Z alcohol distiller, which is slightly nicer than the Still Spirits Air Still. They all come down to a $77 water distiller, although the Air Still and Co-Z do have some modifications (most of which can be done at home):

The $77 water distillers have air vents to get rid of chlorine – one of the first things alcohol distillers do is block these. Probably the same goes for you.
The cheap water distillers have 680-690 watt heating elements (their specs say 750 but my Kill-A-Watt measures 680-690 at full tilt) – too much for alcohol distilling and almost surely too much for your purposes. Still Spirits actually replaces the heating element with a lower wattage one, Co-Z puts in what is effectively a light bulb dimmer – the picture you posted looks identical to the Co-Z.
Removal of all plastic parts – not sure how this affects your uses. The “high-grade” alcohol distilling modders that haven’t just completely given up on air stills put in some copper tubing on the output to remove sulfides – definitely not a problem for you if your input alcohol is Everclear

Out of curiosity I looked at extractohol.com – 1 gallon (3.78) liters of 190 proof is $100, which is roughly 5 750 mL bottles of Everclear – which I’ve seen quoted as $18.99/bottle, so it comes out to around $100 too. Not bad.

Although I’d trust Everclear more to be “food-grade” than extractohol.com’s products… After all, it’s sold specifically for the purposes of human ingestion.

So does someone have a list of components off Amazon which when combined with the Source to have everything needed to run a extraction. I’m having issues with stopper hole diameter to fit with the tubing, beaker, and strainer.

Decarbing is a separate issue. The machine was designed to preserve the delicate attributes of whatever botanical is being extracted. If you are talking about cannabis then there is also an added bonuses to this. It keeps the terpenes strong for potent medicine, it keeps the THC-A from being activated for people who need to make non-activated meds, and it preserves the crystalline structures for those that want to make a stable form concentrate. On the other hand, if you are looking to make a concentrate that is decarbed that is quite simple as you can either decarb the plant material prior to extraction or decarb the oil after the extraction. These days I have become a fan of decarbing the oil post process. The vacuum does not effect decarb as decarb is nearly purely a result of heat application regardless of pressure.

Hi, I’ve been doing this kind of extraction for quite a while and three days ago I started a new batch. I did the same process but this time when the ethanol is gone, the extraction is soo liquid. I tried with another ethanol brand but same result. Any thoughts?

Hi ICHIBANCRAFTER,
It was ethanol, I don’t know why I assumed that no bubbles meant no ethanol. So now I put back the oil in the pan and at low temperature the smoke starts almost straight away. I use a thick glass pan, I can smell the ethanol evaporating as well as sesquiterpenes I imagine? cannabinoids? can you please enlighten me? how can I know when this process is done?

Hey Ichibancrafter! I’ve been doing lots of internet research around making cannabis alcohol tinctures and I am super happy to have found you! Thanks for a great resource!

I have THC-A cannabis which has been sitting in grain alcohol for 10 days. I would like to preserve the non-psychoactive properties (for this batch) and reduce it so that I can add it to honey or some other medium for oral consumption for pain and sleep. There is about 3:1 THC:CBD in the source material, and I’d like to preserve as much of the CBD ( and any other medicinal terpenes, etc) as I can. I want my final product to be non-burning and somewhat palatable!

I can’t afford the extractor that you are advertising, so I am now trying to evaporate the alcohol in a crockpot water bath at approx 150*F, which is as high as my crockpot will go. It is ventilated, but SLOW. Do you have any ideas about a quicker, safer evaporation method? And am I losing medicinal properties with the heat, as compared to the well documented ‘cold’ methods? Thanks so much for your time!

I would get it out of the water bath and off the heat. Even at the low temp, for that amount of time you will be losing the THC-A that you mentioned you wanted to THC conversion. Your best hope would be to go completely old school and pour your wash in a flat pyrex dish, cover with cheese cloth to keep dust and contaminates away, and blow a fan over it for a couple days. You are going to lose a lot of expensive ethanol, and the evaporated fumes are quite dangerous if you don’t have good ventilation, but that is your best bet if you are looking to preserve the THC-A. Once the ethanol is gone, you can heat the pyrex just a tad to loosen the hardened resin then scrap the pyrex with a razor blade, collect the concentrate, mix it with MCT (or another carrier), add flavoring and you are good to go.